One Billion Rising was the largest ever day of global action - online and offline - protesting violence against women and girls. Tens of thousands of flashmobs in hundreds of cities in every country and territory on earth were planned by local activists to focus global attention on the issue on the occasion of V-Day’s 15th anniversary. The #1billionrising social media campaign was a global, multi-channel engagement campaign designed to propagate, harness, and amplify that activity. The campaign included V-Day-produced content, celebrity testimonials, participatory opportunities for our supporters, and real-time live events broadcast online to a global audience.An awareness campaign was launched in February 2012 with content designed to connect with our core community, show the the power of what one billion rising could look like, and to inform and inspire our global audience to get involved and rise. This included a short film, the “I Am Rising" video series featuring personal testimony from both activists and celebrities, and two hashtags, #reasontorise and #1billionrising, which became focal points for women to share their stories and rally around relevant news and cultural moments. Leading up to the main event, the team leveraged V-Day's remarkably creative community of activists and supporters. As a grassroots-driven organization, we asked them to illustrate the breadth of the issue globally, and help demonstrate to the world the power of women and men coming together in over 207 countries to end it. To expand on the theme of the celebrity videos, we asked them to share messages starting with "I Am Rising...", and we received thousands from all around the world. Many creative works were also submitted (see below). Over the course of the campaign, we received tens of thousands of photos, videos, and artworks, including original songs and music videos, poems, and dances. On the day of One Billion Rising (February 14 2013), we shifted our focus to broadcasting events as they unfolded around the globe. We created a robust network of webcasting partners to stream multiple real-time events over 48 hours via our YouTube Live channel and other platforms, from Manilla, to the Democratic Republic of Congo, to Hawai’i. We also curated and aggregated the most expressive, entertaining, and joyous UGC media from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, saturating the social channels with this engaging, highly shareable content. To mimic the offline actions, we created a Thunderclap campaign, an online flashmob, designed to hit Facebook and Twitter at the same time with our core message and branding. #1billionrising went viral. During the 72 hours surrounding One Billion Rising, our campaign achieved 600M impressions on Twitter, trended in 7 countries (Philippines, India, South Africa, UK, Peru, Mexico, USA), and garnered messages of support from David Cameron, Nancy Pelosi, Russell Simmons, and many more. But celebrities were not driving this activity. It was genuinely a grassroots rising. By the end of the campaign, we had increased our social footprint by 1000%, achieved over a billion impressions across mostly owned and earned media, and engaged a global network of supporters on a massive scale. Thanks to the power of social media, the conversation continues online. But the impact was not simply digital. Immediately following February 14, One Billion Rising and V-Day activists helped get the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) passed in the US Senate and House of Representatives, leveraging the conversation that One Billion Rising started for real-life change. The campaign continues in 2014 with One Billion Rising for Justice.
V-Day is a global activist movement to end violence against women and girls. Learn more at vday.org
